How Watch Dogs' Bad Blood DLC Changes the Game

It says a lot when your vigilante is better known for his wardrobe than the cause for which is prepared to die. And that’s the frustrating problem with Watch Dogs’ Aiden Pearce. He has the potential to be iconic, a new breed of hero, yet he lacks the charisma to make people connect or really care about his plight. He suffers personal tragedy, faces awfully grey moral dilemmas, and yet it’s hard to feeling anything for him.

Bad Blood – the first piece of DLC for Watch Dogs – addresses that problem head-on, switching out Pearce in favour of supporting character Raymond ‘T-Bone’ Kenney. If you played through the original campaign, you’ll definitely remember him – he’s the laid-back hacker who helped design ctOS’s code back in the day before turning whistle-blower. With his trucker’s cap and unruly dreadlocks, denim cut and fondness for beer, he’s a world away from Pearce; his humour a much-needed change after Pearce’s po-faced crusade.

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Bad Blood’s story takes place shortly after the events of the main game, as T-Bone prepares to leave the city of Chicago for good. But before he can get out, he’s pulled back into a mysterious set of events centred on Tobias Frewer, another former employee of Blume. T-Bone must save his life and tie-up loose ends before he disappears.

The set-up is simple and easy enough to dip into. It’s important to flag that Bad Blood isn’t an expansion that seeks to reinvent the core experience. It still feels and plays like Watch Dogs – you infiltrate, you hack, you fight, and hopefully escape – but by introducing T-Bone, it has a new slant. Unburdened by Pearce’s misanthropy, Watch Dogs suddenly becomes a lot more enjoyable.

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Kenney is a hacker in his fifties. He’s obviously au fait with all manner of modern tech, having all of the same abilities as Pearce, but he’s also endearingly rusty and old-fashioned; instead of a telescopic nightstick, for instance, he wields a monkey wrench on his back to take down guards at close range. His personality is behind one of the few notable gameplay changes too – the introduction of Eugene, T-Bone’s faithful remote-control car.

In one of the missions, T-Bone infiltrates a high-tech facility where corridors are rigged with laser tripwires that make it impassable for T-Bone. This is when Eugene, unsurprisingly, comes into his own. Able to move freely through small vents and sneak pass guards undetected, Eugene adds a new mini-game-style mechanic which, while not entirely original, is fun to play around with and a decent addition to your arsenal. It also makes the experience just that little less serious. Having spent 12 or so hours in the company of Aiden Pearce, I can’t imagine him giving a name to a remote-control car.

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That said, the campaign of 10 missions still feels like Watch Dogs. As T-Bone, you’ll use pretty much the same abilities and tactics you honed while playing as Pearce. Bad Blood does attempt to reinvigorate the experience, however, by introducing true co-op in the form of one-off missions scattered throughout the city. Referred to as ‘Street Sweep’ in game, the premise is that T-Bone is helping out clean up some of Chicago’s worst districts, taking down gangs. To do so, he can be joined by a friend, who play not as Pearce but as a generic hacker-type. I found these three or so missions I played in co-op to be excellent fun. Despite Aiden’s loner persona, Watch Dogs always felt like a co-op experience to me. Whenever I hijacked cameras in the main campaign, I always felt like I was my own back-up. In a way, technology was your partner. So the inclusion of a fully-fledged co-op mode makes complete sense, opening up a range of new possibilities.

One of the missions I really enjoyed involved non-lethally taking down two targets hiding out on an island. My partner and I swam out – we chose to leave the speed boat – and reached the shore together. I quickly darted round to the other side, scouting out cameras and marking armed guards on the way. We then proceeded to hack the island’s security network, using steam vents and other distractions to pull the guards back-and-forth between us. Slowly, methodically, we picked them off, before closing in on the targets.

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Watch Dogs always offered its players an abundant set of skills and a huge open-world setting, and by adding a second player to help, the possibilities only get bigger. Some of these missions are randomly generated and supporting leaderboards for those teams of two who wish to compete, plus there’s further support in the form of a new branch added to the skill tree that supports Street Sweep. T-Bone can purchase system keys from the Black Market or become a ‘master craftsman’, which buffs all of your crafted items. Co-op hasn’t just been welded on – it’s been thought about for some time.

In short, Bad Blood is still Watch Dogs. It’s not a tonal or stylistic change of gears like Far Cry’s Blood Dragon. But with the introduction of co-op it teases out a highly enjoyable mode from its existing mechanics and the introduction of T-Bone makes the game, well, a bit friendlier. The easiest way to convey that difference is a quick comparison of Aiden and T-Bone’s secret hideouts. After all, you can tell a lot about a man from their high-tech lair. Aiden’s was something straight out of the Dark Knight – clean, clinical, banks of surveillance monitors. This was a man blighted by paranoia. T-Bone’s is set into the basement of an old factory; it has a well-stocked beer fridge and on the wall is a talking moose which, when activated, recites old gags. It’s funny the difference a talking moose can make.

Daniel is IGN's Games Editor over in London. He sometimes writes about movies, too. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.